Open Letter To Jeremy Hunt On The 69th Anniversary Of The NHS

The 69th anniversary today of the National Health Service is a timely but sad occasion on which to draw your attention to the end of the service in England as we have known it, a service for which you have been responsible for over the last five years - the 29th minister since 1948.

Allyson Pollock
Public health academic, expert on health systems and the financing of health care, and advocate of universal public services

Dear Mr Hunt

The 69th anniversary today of the National Health Service is a timely but sad occasion on which to draw your attention to the end of the service in England as we have known it, a service for which you have been responsible for over the last five years - the 29th minister since 1948.

All 28 of your predecessors had a legal duty to provide key health services. The Health and Social Care Act 2012 abolished that duty, and has since given free rein to the external market, building on the internal market introduced in 1990, its development through what are now semi-private NHS Foundation Trusts and the scale-up of the Private Finance Initiative under the Blair government. The dismantling and fragmenting effects of the Act are now being felt in your so-called 'Sustainability and Transformation Plans', reported to require £22-26 billion cuts from health and social care costs in five years. These are proceeding in tandem with local government devolution deals made, according to the New Economics Foundation, "between elites behind closed doors, with minimal, and posthoc public participation", at the same time as the local government finance system is being radically and regressively re-designed, which will increase inequalities.

You are ideologically committed to the market, and the enormous waste of money, lack of strategic planning, and exploitation of staff which implementing it involves may be difficult for you to accept. But you have a moral and political obligation to do so.

We know that the market costs more, as a result of unnecessary services, excessive administrative costs, fraud, denial of care, profits, and other problems - about 30% of health spending in the US in 2009. We know that the £8.7 billion you state was spent on private sector providers of secondary care in 2015/16 - an increase to 7.7% of total NHS expenditure - is a gross under-estimate of how much public NHS money goes to private companies, as it excludes primary care and community and mental health care, contracts between trusts and such companies, management consultants, and legal fees and private finance payments. We know that competing for contracts takes clinical staff away from providing treatment. We know that NHS problems will be further exacerbated by the planned return to PFI (codenamed Project Phoenix) coupled with the Naylor Report on the disposal and further sell of NHS land and buildings.

We know that the market results in dominant providers competing for patients and engaging in risk selection, while fragmenting services.

Cross-party support for lifting the public sector pay cap is welcome but it will not address the inefficiencies of the market or the lack of funding, nor will it help the many staff transferred out of the NHS under commercial contracts to the for-profit sector. Wages and terms and conditions of these staff are not routinely collected.

The 2012 Act marked the end of universality. Under your regressive plans to carve out and shift more health service functions to cash-strapped local authorities as part of the move to STPs, devolution, and so-called 'integration', the only recourse under current policy will be to cut and close NHS services, reduce entitlements, privatise care, and allow charging and sale of private health insurance - which is what the private sector is lobbying for.

Scotland and Wales, also underfunded by the Treasury, have abolished the internal market by removing the disruptive elements and made prescriptions free. Scotland has also made personal care free at point of delivery, allowing for integration of health and social care. We call on you on to face up to the reality of the NHS in England that you have deliberately underfunded and prepared for cuts, closure and privatisation, and to support the NHS Reinstatement Bill.